July 2013

July 30, 2013

Can you believe that Mixology Monday is 75 installments old this month? Paul Clarke's fantastic idea has sparked tons of creative cocktail recipes and writing over the years, and I really should participate more often -- the deadline and structure are wonderful for getting lazy bloggers like me a-tinkering, and it's always neat to see tons of riffs on the same basic theme. This month's host is book-writin', cocktail-creatin' machine Frederic Yarm over at Cocktail Virgin Slut, and he's set for us the theme of "Flip Flop": "Find a recipe, either new or old, and switch around at least two of the ingredients to sister or cousin ingredients but holding the proportions and some of the ingredients the same. The new recipe should be recognizable as a morph of the old one when viewed side by side."

As Jordan Devereaux notes at Chemistry of the Cocktail, "what's amazing about the Mai Tai is how adaptable it is to other spirits." If you use bourbon instead of rums, you can get a Honi Honi, for instance. However, one distinctive feature of the Mai Tai recipe is its combination of two different rums to achieve the desired effect. (This strikes me as a classic Tiki technique.) This blending approach pays off when you shake up the spirit selection. So if you take that Honi Honi and split the bourbon called for there into equal parts bourbon and bonded rye (and switch the lime to a more bourbon-friendly lemon), you get a Bluegrass Mai Tai, which sounds like a much more varied, richer drink. A Mai Tai made with tequila (or is it a Margarita spiked with orgeat?) is a Pinky Gonzalez, invented by Trader Vic in 1964. And, our host this month even raised the bar with a Sherry Mai Tai, employing an Amontillado and a Pedro Ximénez -- I can't even picture this one and want to take a whack at it.

I attended a Tiki Monday a while back that was sponsored by Brooklyn Gin, and I was looking forward to the possibilities of more gin tiki drinks. Of course, Tiki Mondays impresario Brian Miller created the fantastic (and fantastically complex) Winchester, which he characterizes as "a gin Zombie." Miller and this blog's favorite bartender, Brooklyn Gin's Damon Dyer, served up all sorts of interesting drinks, and I had enough of them that, well, I don't really remember what I had. But it did inspire me to try my hand at mixing several different gins together in a quest for a juniper-y Mai Tai. After some trial and error, I landed on this combination of malty Bols genever, citrusy Brooklyn Gin, and a rum-based orange liqueur. And the name? That comes from what I said the first time I tried this.

July 09, 2013

Bubbles are awesome. Who could argue? I drink a lot -- a lot -- of seltzer, because it's way more interesting than tap water. I probably go through about a liter a day, just for personal consumption -- more if I'm making fizzy cocktails. At 2.2 pounds per liter bottle, that's a lot of heavy bottles to haul up the stairs of my fourth-floor walkup, to say nothing of the amount of plastic I'd buy from the grocery store, the pollution caused by the trucks who deliver it the store, et cetera. And while I'm a history and nostalgia buff, I'm not quite up for paying Walter the Seltzer Man or the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys to deliver me glass siphons. (It would certainly be cool, but it's hard enough getting the Postal Service to deliver to my building.) So I do as increasing numbers of people do and make my own fizzy water. Ever since Dave Arnold showed me how he makes his, I've been hooked.

Yeah, you can get a SodaStream setup practically anywhere, starting at about eighty bucks, and they do make fine seltzer. It's fantastic to have an unlimited supply of bubbles in your kitchen or at your desk. Their footprint is small, and the design is sleek. The company is doing land-office business and expanding rapidly. But, there are a few drawbacks. The proprietary carbonator capsules that the SodaStream runs on cost about $35 for a new carbonator holding enough gas to carbonate 60 liters of seltzer. (That's for a spare; a new SodaStream soda maker comes with a carbonator capsule included.) When that runs out, it costs about $15 to exchange an empty carbonator for a full one at a SodaStream retailer. Some models run on 130-liter carbonators. This seems like a hassle to me, and an expensive one. (You can hack your SodaStream to run on a paintball canister, but this will run you at least $60 and swaps one hassle for another.)

So: how do I do it? Easy. I have a carbon dioxide tank, with a regulator and some hoses. I use an adaptor that connects the gas line to a plastic bottle, and that's it.

I started by picking up a new ten-pound aluminum CO2 cylinder tank. You can use whatever size you like, but for me a ten-pound tank was a nice sweet spot between portability, heft, and not having to refill it much. ("ten pounds" here refers to the weight of the gaseous CO2 in the tank, not the weight of the tank itself, which is more.) I also liked that the ten-pound tank has a plastic handle on the top, which definitely helps in moving it around. You can get steel tanks, and you can certainly find used ones for cheap. (One caveat is that used tanks have to pass leak tests; here's a good rundown of cylinder markings.) Shop around -- since they're heavy, you may want to pay attention to shipping costs. I got my tank from BeverageFactory.com, where it ran me $83 with $18 in shipping from California to New York City. (As of this writing, they're going for $85 with $21 in shipping.) It's 20.5" tall with a 7" diameter, and my girlfriend kindly allows me to keep it in a corner of the kitchen.

You'll need a gas regulator, too, to knock the gas down from tank pressure to dispensing pressure, not to mention hoses, hose clamps, and gas fittings. (You want a "ball-lock" fitting, which is the type of connection that beer kegs use.) You can absolutely find these components separately, but I decided to spend a tad more and get a set that was already hooked up. From KegConnection.com, I purchased their "Soda Carbonating Kit" for $70. This consists of a two-gauge KegConnection.com-branded regulator with an overpressure relief valve, and a hose attached to its barb. The other end of the hose has a ball-lock gas connector already attached to it. Since I hadn't messed around with pressurized gas before, I thought it best to let the pros attach all that stuff for me ahead of time.

I also added a spare carbonater [sic] cap for $15. This is the all-important adapter between a plastic bottle's threads and the gas fitting, and it'll fit on a one-liter, two-liter, or even a 20-ounce bottle. Shipping on this order was a flat $8. (Some people have hacked together their own carbonator cap for even cheaper, using a Schrader tire valve stem inserted into a hole drilled into a soda bottle cap, but I decided to pay a little more for convenience instead of building my own cap. The carbonater cap has a rubber O-ring and a spring-loaded poppet valve so it can seal the bottle tightly against gas leaks.)

When everything arrived, I took the tank over to my local gas dealer and paid $19 to fill it with CO2. (Fire extinguisher suppliers, welding-supply houses, and lots of other places will sell you CO2. Even paintball or aquarium stores!) Got it home, and got a-carbonatin'. Fill a plastic soda bottle (you want a soda bottle, i.e., one that's designed to handle pressure, or it could burst dangerously and messily) to about the shoulder mark. Squeeze out all the air space, and put the carbonater cap on. Get your liquid cold -- remember Boyle's Law from high school? The lower the temperature of your liquid, the more gas you can get to dissolve into it -- and you're ready to carbonate. Attach the ball-lock fitting to the carbonater cap, making sure the spring-loaded collar snaps home and it's all the way on. Open the valve on the CO2 tank, and the gauges will come alive to show you how much gas is left in the tank and the pressure of the outgoing gas. (You can easily adjust the level of carbonation in your finished drink by changing the outgoing gas pressure on the regulator.) Open the valve on the downstream side of the regulator, and the bottle will inflate with a loud pop. Shake the bottle for sixty seconds or so, to increase the surface area of the liquid that's in contact with the gas, and that's it. Close up all your valves, put the bottle in the fridge to settle down, and pour yourself a nice drink.

So yes, the start-up costs are higher than a SodaStream, but the curves converge when you take ongoing expenses into account. My local grocery store sells its store brand seltzer for $0.40 a liter, making it $120 for 300 liters -- roughly a bottle a day, six days a week, for a year. (That's also 660 pounds of water to haul the four flights of stairs to my apartment.) The cheapest Sodastream is $80 (and most are around $100), plus exchanging four carbonator capsules to carbonate a total of 300 liters of water will come to around $60. So with Sodastream, you're spending $140 for the same amount of seltzer, and an additional $60/year in operating expenses. I spent $213 on my rig, including shipping and CO2, and my ten-pound tank will theoretically carbonate around 500 liters of very fizzy seltzer, with only a $19 cost to refill it with CO2. And, as I noted, it's a lot more fun to experiment with this stuff on your own with a machine you've assembled yourself. And you can fizzify anything you want to!